Do not go by return. Imo many inexperienced people post % return. It is much easier to double $10,000 than $10,000,000. All I care about is the net amount I bring in. When I used to walk around the trading floor I wouldn't say oh joe sixpack is a better trader making $1500 a day on $500,000 bp than I would a guy who was making $25-$50,000 on a much larger account. When you deal with bigger gains and losses trading gets a lot harder.
I'll second that! Educate yourself first, then trade. (Though learning with your real money tends to help the lessons stick :eek: )
You should talk Anek-you have to be the biggest bullshitter there is. You have been caught bullshitting so many times its not funny. Time to STFU.
I haven't been at it long enough to really say, that's part of the reason I'm posting on the P/L thread, to keep myself honest. It's an incentive to keep disciplined along with the $$ I know I'll eventually lose when I lose discipline. I know I've been registered here for a while, but I got interested in daytrading and automated system trading (still not there yet) a while ago, but had to let the interest go for a while at that point in my life.
Have you done any automated trading? My husband's been backtesting for strategies and found some amazingly profitable ones in Backtest Land. Wondering how it pans out in the real world. (An old Bill Gates marketing joke is coming to mind...)
No, I haven't automated anything yet. There are quite a few people on here who have, though. So, it can be done and is still a future goal. My husband likes fiddling with it all, too. He's got the job with the constant money flow, though, so he's got to stick with that for the time being I'll have to see how this trading gig holds up, I stay home to take care of my kids, and I planned on trading while they were both napping, but scalping just doesn't fit me, so the trading has spilled over to many other parts of the day. Might have to put it on hold again til they're in school. My husband works from home, though, so his hours are somewhat flexible (lots of conference calls, though, that aren't so flexible), which helps.
Susannah I would suggest you drop into the ES JOURNAL thread once in awhile during the day. There you will find some good tidbits about trading the intraday "LEVELS" and not a bunch of tick grabbers which is a rookie strategy because they have yet failed to capture the intradays "RUNS". Think about making more money than your hubbie. ..
My autotraders are running between 5% and 5.5% net monthly and I've been using them constantly for the better part of a year and a half. Not stellar by many standards (cap gains at tax time hurts), but I'm content.
Canyonman, what system do you use, what do you trade, and about how many trades a day does your autotrader manage?